By James Ryder Kristen (Amber Heard) finds herself being drug into a mental hospital after burning down a house in Oregon. “Why am I here!” she demands to know (it may have something to do with the arson you just committed, but hey...). The staff, led by Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris), is tight lipped. The other girls in the hospital (Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker, Laura-Leigh, Lyndsy Fonseca) know more than they’re letting on. You’ve seen this type of movie before. What’s new is that the hospital may be haunted by a former patient, targeting the girls for elimination. The pre-credits sequence shows a patient named Tammy being incapacitated by the ghost in the room Kristen will soon come to call her own. Other girls begin to disappear not long after…
The Ward, were it directed by a first timer, would be quickly relegated to overnight filler on cable or boxed in a DVD “Valu-Pak” with several other cheapies. However, the presence of director John Carpenter not only adds a certain pedigree to the film, his considerable skill as a filmmaker gives the film visual flair and well-paced editing that likely would not exist otherwise.
The majority of the fault in this film lies in the script by second timers Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen. Outside of a few flourishes (the girls dancing to period music), the duo does nothing to elevate the story from the standard Mental Hospital Thriller template. This subgenre has limited variables, typically how mean the staff will be, how barbaric will the treatment be and what type of illness our protagonist has. The answers are generally “Very,” “Very” and “Something Dissociative.” When you have that level of cliché present in the script, even skillful direction can’t save a well versed viewer from groaning at a scene they’ve seen in a dozen other movies.
In the past two years we’ve seen the films Sucker Punch and Shutter Island carry similar plots. While there are subtle differences between the three, and The Ward is perhaps the most conventional horror film - Sucker Punch aimed for fantasy and Shutter Island played on psychological “is it real or not” elements as much as horror. Though Shutter Island is probably the most “must see” of the three because of its director’s stature as “Best Living American Filmmaker™,” I’d actually recommend The Ward over Sucker Punch, simply because Sucker Punch, for all its ambition, was thematically incoherent. While The Ward doesn’t set out to depict anything new, for the most part it works for what it is.
Film and horror buffs will likely be frustrated by some of the clichés – I certainly was. As far as scariness, this film falls into what I refer to as a “training” horror film. It isn’t particularly scary to long time horror fans, though it might still be intense for the coveted teenager audience demographic, ones perhaps attending their first R-rated horror film. Its greatest flaw isn’t that anything is bad; it’s that it’s unexceptional.
(c) 2011 Beyond the Films
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